They were surrounded.
Evans got deathly pale and unusually quiet.
One of the Asian men motioned for them to put their hands in the air. “If you please, Mr. Odin.”
McKinney turned to Odin. He nodded encouragingly but without much conviction. She felt her heart sink. She wasn’t used to seeing him caught off guard.
Several men rushed over to them, patting them down as a white, unmarked panel van rolled up nearby. Even more armed men in suits got out. One of the men grabbed the paper printouts of the Ebba Maersk from Odin. Another grabbed the backpack from McKinney.
She felt fear rushing through her again. Were these Chinese government agents? She, Odin, and Evans were, after all, in the country illegally. But the quality of the men’s suits began to put doubts in her head. Corrupt officials, gangsters—there was really very little difference.
The men roughly and very intimately frisked her, while another man pulled her hands behind her back and secured them with plastic zip-ties. They then marched all three of their prisoners to the panel van and pushed them inside.
Evans was looking more angry by the minute. “This is why I fucking hate you, Odin. I had a life, man.” He closed his eyes in a hard squint as if having difficulty coping with his anxiety.
Odin shook his head, muttering. “Zollo . . . zollo . . . zollo.”
“Don’t even pull that bullshit with me right now.”
They were all lying on the corrugated metal floor of the van with several men standing over them holding small black submachine guns. The van accelerated, sending the prisoners sliding. One of the guards kicked Evans.
“Ow!”
McKinney rolled over to look at Odin. “Odin. Who are these people?”
One of the other guards stomped on McKinney with his expensive dress shoes. The effect was less than he’d probably intended, but she kept quiet.
Odin just stared ahead, unreadable. She’d never seen him like that, which worried her more than anything else.
They didn’t drive long—just a few minutes. Given the size of the container yard, McKinney felt fairly certain that they couldn’t have left the premises in that time. Sure enough, when the van stopped and the guards opened the rear doors to drag them out, she could see that they were in the vast, empty section of the container yard where the weaver drone shipment had departed. There was nothing but empty pavement and silent shipping cranes for hundreds of meters in every direction—and the water of the Pearl River Delta close at hand. There were fewer men now—but still about a dozen. And they were all armed. McKinney, Odin, and Evans each had two men haul them by the elbows toward the water’s edge. McKinney felt her adrenaline spiking. This used to be an alien sensation—facing imminent death—but she was starting to become familiar with it.
The men stopped at the dock’s edge and pulled McKinney and the others upright with their backs to the water. From this perspective McKinney could now see a sleek, midnight blue Sikorsky S-76 helicopter parked not too far away in the vast empty space, its idle blades drooping. The chopper was facing nose-away from them, and one of the suited Asian men approached it holding McKinney’s backpack. He rapped on the fuselage, then handed the backpack to someone inside.
In a moment a suited Caucasian man stepped out of the chopper and approached with a casual confidence. Well before he reached them McKinney recognized him.
It was Ritter—the man who had pretended to be a Homeland Security agent all the way back in Kansas City. McKinney glanced over at Odin, but he seemed to be in his own world. That truly frightened her.
Ritter stopped ten feet away and nodded to Odin. “You got off with a warning as a professional courtesy, David. A warning you ignored.” Ritter nodded to the lead Asian man. “Get this over with.”
Odin spoke calmly, seemingly to himself. “White. Two through five. Red. One-two.”
“Apologies, but I’ll need DNA evidence.”
McKinney felt her heart race as three of the Asian men produced long, sharp-looking stilettos and walked toward them.
Evans shouted, “Oh, God! No! No! Wait!”
McKinney was speechless, mouthing silent words.
A howling sound came in on the breeze—and a thwack as a fist-sized hole blasted through the nearest man’s chest. The men to either side of her shouted, dropping her. She pitched forward onto the cement.
Odin shouted as he tumbled next to her. “Stay down, Professor!”
There were shouts in Chinese and she could see expensive shoes scrambling every direction across the pavement, and a thick rivulet of blood oozing toward her. Now there were short bursts of machine gun fire, followed by several more incoming high-pitched whines and thwacks. Screams. Men shouting, “Bié tóuxiáng!”